Field of the Disclosure
Certain aspects of the present disclosure generally relate to wireless communications and, more specifically, to software enabled access points (softAP or S-AP) standby power optimization across an arbitrary number of associated clients.
Description of Related Art
Wireless communication networks are widely deployed to provide various communication services such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, etc. These wireless networks may be multiple-access networks capable of supporting multiple users by sharing the available network resources. Examples of such multiple-access networks include Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) networks, Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) networks, Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) networks, Orthogonal FDMA (OFDMA) networks, and Single-Carrier FDMA (SC-FDMA) networks.
Generally, a wireless multiple-access communication system can simultaneously support communications for multiple wireless terminals. Each terminal communicates with one or more base stations via transmissions on the forward and reverse links. The forward link (or downlink) refers to the communication link from the base stations to the terminals, and the reverse link (or uplink) refers to the communication link from the terminals to the base stations. This communication link may be established via a single-input single-output, multiple-input single-output or a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system.
One use of a wireless terminal is to send and receive data carried via a packet data network (PDN). Generally, an Access Point Name (APN) is used to identify a PDN for a mobile data user to communicate with. In addition to identifying the PDN, the APN may also be used to define the type of service. Examples of such connection-based services include a connection to a wireless application protocol (WAP) server, multimedia messaging services (MMS), or an internet protocol (IP) multimedia subsystem (IMS) service (e.g., voice over IP (VoIP), video telephony or text messaging) provided by a particular PDN. An APN is used in 3GPP data access networks, e.g. general packet radio service (GPRS), evolved packet core (EPC).
A wireless device may be capable of accessing the Internet over a wireless wide-area network (WWAN) connection and accepting connections over a wireless local area network (WLAN) connection. With these features, the device is capable of connecting to the Internet over the WWAN and sharing the Internet connection with other wireless devices over the WLAN. A wireless device with these capabilities may be referred to as a software enabled access point (softAP). SoftAP wireless devices are often portable devices and as such, battery life is a concern.
Current implementations of softAPs may attempt to save power by duty-cycling (e.g., power shutoff) the softAP. However, duty-cycling may impact AP discoverability or result in packet loss with multiple connected clients.